i remember when the two crates first came in here to the schaumberg, and we opened those crates up. i was fortunate enough, howard dotson invited me and the late james gilbert, photographer, to come over, and we opened up these crates and saw all of this here, a plethora of information. tremendous stuff. it had gone through a circuitous change because one of the daughters had put it in storage down in florida, it had been auctioned off. a man had bought like a pig in a poke, he didn't know what he had. my goodness. he sent it off to san francisco to butterfield's where it was going to be auctioned off. the family stopped that process with a court injunction. all of it came here. you must understand that. zaheer, you mentioned 1959. that's a very important year because that's the year, march of 1959 is when punitively he, malcolm x, wrote a letter to elijah mohamed about troubles he was having in his marital relationship with betty. what malcolm said in that letter and, of course, that letter has to be challenged because it's only one reference that manning gives to that letter, and

[laughter] my name's khalil muhammad, i'm the new director of the schaumberg, and so this is a real honorbe here. >> [applause] congratulations. >> my question has to do with postracialism or the age of obama. a moment in which the kind of authentic black voice seems to be buried along with the n word as a creature of the jim crow era and everything that came before. what i'm wondering is, um, if black people are disappearing from networks as i think we talked about, and the issue of creative control, um, is one that is still a struggle. how is that impacting the kind of writing that critiques white america in the way that richard pryor's voice once did? i mean, dave chapelle literally was unable to balance that line in a moment which i would argue made it even more difficult, the sensibility. and i think, mel, i think you would bring that kind of depth to thinking about this. the sensibility that richard pryor brought to his material was also grounded in a moment where white people were being much more self-reflective of the history of this country given what was happening literally on t